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{{Infobox book
| name = ''The Feminead: or, female genius. A poem.''
| image = Title page of Duncombe's Feminead 2nd ed.jpg
| caption = Title page of John Duncombe's ''The Feminead'' (1754), 2nd edition (1757)([https://books.google.com/books?id=g7ohAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1 Google Books])
| author = [[John Duncombe (writer)|John Duncombe]]
| cover_artist =
| country = [[United Kingdom|Britain]]
| language = [[English language|English]]
| subject =
| publisher = London: M. Cooper (1st edition); R. & J. Dodsley (2nd edition)
| release_date = 1754; rpt. 1757
| media_type =
| pages =
| isbn =
}}

[[John Duncombe (writer)|John Duncombe]] (1729-1786) published his "canon-forming"<ref>Landry, Donna. “The traffic in women poets.” ''The Eighteenth Century'', vol. 32, no. 2, 1991, pp. 180–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41467517. Accessed 24 Jun. 2022.</ref> celebration of British women writers as ''The Feminiad'' in 1754, though the title was revised as '''''The Feminead''''' in the second, 1757 edition.

==The argument==
The piece is an essay in verse, a form popular in the eighteenth century, consisting of 380 lines of [[Heroic couplet|heroic couplets]]. Duncombe argues that women "shine, / In mind and person equally divine" and urges his readers to resist the "undisputed reign" of "Prejudice" and instead "sing the glories of a sister-choir." He appeals to his readers' sense of nationalism by contrasting "free-born" "British nymphs" to a stereotypical image of women in a "Seraglio," and situates his subjects in a cultural lineage stemming from classical Greece and Rome.

Duncombe takes care to clarify that his support of women artists only extends to those who continue to fulfill their assigned feminine roles and suggests that the pursuit of art and culture might keep women away from more frivolous pursuits:

{{poemquote|
But lives there one, whose unassuming mind,
Tho' grac'd by nature, and by art refin'd,
Pleas'd with domestic excellence, can spare
Some hours from studious ease to social care,
And with her pen that time alone employs
Which others waste in visits, cards, and noise;
From affectation free, tho' deeply read,
"With wit well natur'd, and with books well bred?"
With such (and such there are) each happy day
Must fly improving, and improv'd away;
Inconstancy might fix and settle there,
And Wisdom's voice approve the chosen fair.
}}

Duncombe makes a selective survey of British women writers. He quickly passes over the racier writers of the previous age such as [[Aphra Behn|Behn]], [[Susannah Centlivre|Centlivre]], and [[Delarivier Manley|Manley]], as well as memoirists [[Teresia Constantia Phillips|Phillips]], [[Laetitia Pilkington|Pilkington]], and  [[Frances Anne Vane|Vane]]— part of "a pattern of contradictory inscription and subordination of women writers that recurs throughout eighteenth-century and Romantic formulations of literary tradition"<ref name="Kucich" /> — to catalogue the moral and artistic virtues of writers still, in most cases, living. Many of the writers mentioned were connected to the [[Blue Stockings Society]], an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century.

Duncombe does not address the subject of writing as a paid profession, but frames it as an avocation. ''The Feminead'' ends on a strategic note, with the argument that women who are encouraged to learn and create make better wives and mothers. Such appeals to the presumed self-interests of the reader were not uncommon in early pro-feminist texts.

==Context==
Duncombe's poem was popular and well-received but not unique; it is one of "multiple attempts to promote and anthologize women writers as important members of the national literary tradition,"<ref name="Kucich">Kucich, Greg. “Gendering the Canons of Romanticism: Past and Present.” ''The Wordsworth Circle'', vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, pp. 95–102. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24042631. Accessed 24 Jun. 2022.</ref> part of what scholar Moira Ferguson calls an "eruption of female panegyrics," mainly by men, that includes [[George Ballard (biographer)|George Ballard's]] ''Memoirs of British Ladies'' (biographies of sixty-five notable women; 1752); [[Theophilus Cibber|Theophilus Cibber's]] ''Lives of the Poets'' (1753); [[George Colman the Elder|George Colman]] and [[Bonnell Thornton]]'s anthology, ''[[Poems by Eminent Ladies]]'' (1755); [[Thomas Amory (author)|Thomas Amory]]'s ''Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain'' (1755); and ''Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. London: Printed for S. Crowder, 1766. 2 vols.'' (Anon; 1766).<ref>Ferguson, Moira. "'The cause of my sex': Mary Scott and the female literary tradition." ''Huntington Library Quarterly'' 50.4 (Autumn 1987), p. 359.</ref> In 1774, [[Mary Scott (poet)|Mary Scott]] published ''[[The Female Advocate|The Female Advocate; a poem. Occasioned upon reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead]]'' (London: Joseph Johnson) in which she expresses her "grateful pleasure" to Duncombe, as well as her desire to recognize a further group of writers: she includes above fifty, three of whom Duncombe had recognized: [[Hester Chapone|Chapone]], [[Katherine Philips|Philips]], and [[Laetitia Pilkington|Pilkington]]. All these texts taken together, according to Betty Schellenberg, indicate the broad cultural significance of women's authorship by the mid-eighteenth century.<ref>Schellenberg, Betty A. "The Professional Female Writer." ''The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789, Cambridge''. Edited by Catherine Ingrassia. Cambridge University Press, 2015.</ref>

==Writers named in ''The Feminead''==
{{columns-list|
*[[Aphra Behn]] (1640–1689)
*[[Frances Brooke]] (1724–1789)
*[[Elizabeth Carter]] (1717–1806)
*[[Susannah Centlivre]] (1669–1723)
*[[Hester Chapone]] (1727–1801)
*[[Catharine Trotter Cockburn]] (1679–1749)
*[[Susanna Duncombe]] (1725–1812) 
*[[Anne Kingsmill Finch]] (1661–1720)
*[[Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irvine|Anne Ingram]] (c. 1696 – 1764)
*[[Mary Leapor]] (1722–1746)
*[[Judith Madan]] (1702–1781)
*[[Delarivier Manley]] (1663 or c. 1670 – 1724) 
*[[Martha Peckard]] (1729–1805)
*[[Elizabeth Pennington]] (1732–1759)
*[[Katherine Philips]] (1632–1664)
*[[Teresia Constantia Phillips]] (1709–1765) 
*[[Laetitia Pilkington]] (c. 1709 – 1750)
*[[Elizabeth Singer Rowe]] (1674–1737)
*[[Frances Seymour, Duchess of Somerset]] (born 1699)
*[[Frances Anne Vane]] (c. 1715 – 1788)
*[[Mehetabel Wesley Wright]] (1697–1750) 
}}

==See also==
*''[[The Female Advocate]]''
*''[[Wikisource:The feminead: or, Female genius|The feminead: or, female genius]]'' (Wikisource)
*[[Mary Scott (poet)|Mary Scott]]
*[[Women's writing (literary category)]]

==Etexts==
*[https://archive.org/details/feminiadpoem17540000dunc Digitized version] of [[Augustan Reprint Society]] edition (1981) available at the [[Internet Archive]]
*[https://books.google.com/books?id=g7ohAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1 Digitized version of 2nd edition] available at [[Google Books]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
*[https://www.faculty.umb.edu/elizabeth_fay/toc2.htm The Bluestocking Archive]

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[[Category:Lists of women]]
[[Category:18th-century poetry]]
[[Category:18th century in women's history]]
[[Category:English poems]]